One of my goals in 2020 (and 2021!) is to read more. See other books I've read or listened to here.
I picked up Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal by Ava Chin at a goodwill this year.
During one of her most difficult and challenging years, Ava Chin discovers her love of foraging and it changes her life forever.
When I picked this up my husband said I wasn’t going to like it. He predicted that this was going to be too much of a self help book, too much of a romance, too cloying. And he was right, for the most part it was not a self help book). Chin shares difficult areas of life: her break up, difficult relationship with her month and father, her grandmother’s failing health, insecurity in work and life as she moved through her 30s. She also shares the joys of discovering foraging and her growing confidence in the subject. Unfortunately the way she conveys this information is disorganized, jumps confusingly in time, and is told in a surprisingly over dramatic way. Her writing is flowery, over descriptive and twee. It’s hard to be so critical of a memoir, bc this not only is someone’s life, but how they want to tell you about it. Even though many aspects of this book were not only disappointing but actually offensive to me, I can’t discount that this is Ava Chin’s story in her own words. That being said, if I can sum up how I felt about this book in three words: overly self indulgent. I appreciate Chin’s difficult childhood, her troubles navigating even the most basic of romantic relationships, her crushing insecurities about work and her own abilities, her self pity and denial of privilege, but I can’t appreciate the sappy and sophomoric way in which she relates these things. What I found most offensive was that despite all the phycological, physical and emotional work she does to over come her difficulties, the only thing that really makes her problems feel solved (to herself) is finding a boyfriend. She takes the reader on a journey of healing, but is the lasting lesson is one is not whole with out a man. I was greatly disappointed that one of the only books I read by an Asian American author in 2020 was a terrible book, especially bc it was a memoir of a mostly interesting life. But I know that is more my short coming at not reading enough diverse authors. I bought Eating Wildly with the idea that I would pass it on to a foraging friend after I was done, but I cannot recommend this book to her or anyone else.
Have you ever gotten a book that you hoped to pass on but decided you couldn’t?